Car hire A LOT cheaper if I put residency as France, anyone done this and suceeded?

gregdedman

Hi all,

I was about to book car hire and saw that my browser had put my location and thus, residency to France.
I changed the residency to UK and see that the price is £10 more per day!
I did some research and low and behold, we're being ripped off and even the EU commission have asked car hire companies to stop penalising EU citizens by charging different prices dependant on where they are from.

My question.....has anyone ever booked car hire with their residency set to another country and got away with it?

So angry that despite these companies being told to cease, Europcar in particular are still breaking EU recommendations to ensure a free EU market.

Westin

I recall having the television on last week and there was some rather childish type consumer show on which was showing just this. It was childish I thought because the presenters were dressing up in different costumes to represent different nationalities then going into to some poor underpaid counter staff in a Hertz sub-office to challenge the policy of different rates for different countries.

The point that they could have made without dragging in out was indeed some car rental firms do have different rates for residents of different countries. Some however were more expensive than a UK citizen.

The easy test would be to select a different country from the drop down menu on the car rental firms website (rather than dress up with a black and white stripped top, a string of onions around your neck and arrive on a push bike at the car rental office) and play around to see what the differences are. From that then perhaps challenge and try for a price match.

Not sure however what the legalities would be if you booked as a citizen of another country then pitched up with a UK licence.

gardner1

same as holiday companies/airlines charging more in uk than other parts of Europe.......because they know they can squeeze more out of brits

Gloomendoom

I've just had the opposite experience with the .de and .uk holidayautos sites. In Germany at the moment so it defaulted to .de but gave me a rate roughly £6 a day more than on the .uk site. Same car, same supplier.

getmore4less

Check you are are getting like for like,

especialy insurance cover and exesses.